TOMASZ ZYGLEWICZ

research

PUBLICATIONS

  • Wanting is not expected utility. Forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. [link]

  • Truth-conditional variability of color ascriptions: empirical results concerning the polysemy hypothesis. (with Adrian Ziółkowski) forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Vol. 5 (eds. J. Knobe & S. Nichols) [link]

  • Associative exportation. P. Stalmaszczyk & M. Hinton (eds.), "Philosophical Approaches to Language and Communication," Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022: 343-357. [link]

  • Objective and epistemic gradability: is the New Angle on the Knobe Effect empirically grounded? (with Bartosz Maćkiewicz), Philosophical Psychology 2019 32(2): 234-256. [link]

  • Sophisticated textualism and sanctions. Studia Iuridica 2019 82: 343-357.

  • Against ‘the input view’ of legal gaps. Archiwum Filozofii Prawa i Filozofii Społecznej 2019 2(20): 75-88.

  • Can a consequentialist be a good friend? Etyka 2016 52: 56-79.


WORK IN PROGRESS

  • A paper on desire reports. (R&R at Analysis)

  • A paper on slur reclamation. (R&R at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy)

    Reclamation of a slur involves a creation of a new, positively-valenced meaning that gradually replaces the old pejorative meaning. This means that at a critical stage, the slur is ambiguous. It has been claimed that this ambiguity is polysemy. However, this view fails to explain why the introduction of the new meaning forces the old one out of existence. I argue that this datapoint can be explained by invoking the mechanism of homonymic conflict, and, therefore, that the ambiguity involved in reclamation is homonymy. I argue that my account provides a neat way of conceptualizing the difference between two types of conceptual engineering, namely reclamation and amelioration. I conclude by suggesting that we need to rethink the standard ways of drawing the distinction between polysemy and homonymy.

    keywords: polysemy, homonymy, ambiguity, slurs, reclamation, homonymic conflict

  • A paper on philosophical method. (under review)

  • 'Believe' as an evidential. [handout] (draft available upon request)

    • Ann believes every vegan should take a B12 supplement. Bob says to his vegan friend Carol, whom Ann has never heard of or met in any way: “Ann believes you should take a B12 supplement.” Kyle Blumberg and Harvey Lederman (2021) have proposed a dispositionalist analysis of such revisionist attitude reports: their function is to report what the ascribe would have believed, had they known what we know. I show that their view fails to account for revisionist reports about inanimate objects, and offer an alternative hypothesis capable of doing that. According to my view, revisionist reports function as evidentials: by uttering them, speakers cite the ascribee as the source of evidence about the prejacent. Next, I go a step further and suggest that the default – if not the only – meaning of ‘believe’ is evidential. While semantically unorthodox, the thesis receives independent support from cognitive science.

  • Truth-value judgments. (with Kevin Reuter and Eric Mandelbaum)(in preparation)

    • Experimental philosophers routinely rely on the truth-value judgment task (TVJ), in which participants indicate whether a statement in question is true or false. In this paper, we present a novel critique of the task. The truth-value judgment presupposes that people are correspondentists, that is, that they classify a statement as true if and only if the proposition it expresses corresponds to the reality. However, recent studies have shown that this assumption is questionable. In particular, folk truth-value judgments seem to be sensitive to the evidence available to the speaker (Reuter, forthcoming; Reuter & Brun, 2022), their intentions (Handley-Miner et al., 2023), and the modal status of the proposition expressed (Johnson-Laird et al., 2023). In this paper, we present an experiment that takes a cue from this finding and demonstrates how the correspondentist assumption has confounded studies on contextualism about color predicates. Not only do our findings challenge the empirical standing of linguistic contextualism, they also serve as a cautionary tale about the uncritical use of TVJ. We conclude by presenting some interventions that nudge people towards applying “is true” in a correspondentist fashion.

    keywords: truth-value judgments, semantics, contextualism, color predicates, experimental philosophy

  • Folk ontological relativism. (with Kevin Reuter and Eric Mandelbaum)(in preparation)

    • It is a truism among scientists that there is only one objective reality, which is the same for everyone and whose properties are independent of how people perceive it. Call this truism “ontological realism.” We present the results of a series of experiments suggesting that the majority of philosophically untutored people embrace the opposite view, ontological relativism, which not only distinguishes between my reality, your reality, etc., but also attributes different properties to these realities.

    keywords: truth-value judgments, semantics, contextualism, color predicates, experimental philosophy

  • A paper on gossip. (Title TBD) (with Shannon Brick)